Are All MSPs for Sale? Recent Buys Makes it Seem That Way

Are All MSPs for Sale? Recent Buys Makes it Seem That Way

By Doug Barney

MSP buyouts keep accumulating as Accumuli snapped up Signify Solutions, a managed provider focused on two-factor authentication (2FA).

On the heels of the Accumuli announcement, EarthLink, Inc. announced that it will buy 13-year-old MSP CenterBeam, Inc. for $22 million.

2FA is far, far more secure than even strong, complex passwords, which can still be cracked through brute force.

The two in two-factor refers to the fact that you need two forms of identification. One can usually pick two items from a list of three approaches, something the user knows – in most cases a password though it could be an answer to a question, something physical like a retina or fingerprint, and something the user has such as a credit or ATM card, or the like.

For Accumili, collecting up Signify is all about offering more security services.

“The acquisition is in line with Accumuli’s strategy of helping customers secure their business through a combination of technology, professional services and managed services,” Accumuli said. “Signify fits closely with the company’s existing portfolio and adds capability in 2FA. This synergy will allow Accumuli to promote and cross-sell Signify’s authentication services to its wider client base and vice versa.”

Accumuli believes that two-factor authentication is more important as ever, as more workers use their own devices (BYOD) and more employees work remotely. In either case, there is less IT confidence that the device and the person deserve to be authenticated.

“Given the growing mobility of today's workforce, it is becoming increasingly important for all organizations to secure remote access to systems and information. Adding 2FA managed services to our established portfolio of IT security solutions represents the next logical step in our value proposition to help customers secure their business and reduce operating costs,” said Accumuli CEO Gavin Lyons.


Accumuli’s Gavin Lyons

Market Factors

2FA is part of the multi-factor authentication market (you can generally go up to five-factor for shops where security is insanely paramount) and includes powerhouses such as Symantec.

MarketsandMarkets follows this market and found it will grow at a CAGR of 17.3 percent and hit $5.45 billion in 2017.

2FA clearly dominates, accounting for some 90 percent of the overall market. Multi-factor “MFA is increasingly getting deployed at all the security checkpoints of airports, commercial complex, retail malls, banking and finance, etc. MFA provides accurate authentication and negligible margin of duplicity or error,” the researchers said.

Here is how the research house describes the technology: “Three-factor authentications include smart card with pin and biometric technology, smart card with two biometric technologies, pin with two biometric technologies and three biometric authentications,” MarketsandMarkets explained. “On the other hand, four- and five-factor authentication includes the use of smart card and pin with more than one type of biometric technology such as face recognition, fingerprint recognition, voice recognition, etc. Three-factor authentication is mostly used in private access areas like bank lockers, secret data access, defense and travel & immigration. The use of four- and five-factor authentication models is restricted to high cost projects in defense, research, and government-based applications.”




Edited by Alisen Downey
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